Thursday Night Widows E-Book

Claudia Piñeiro

• Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Seitenzahl: 408

Beschreibung

"An agile novel written in a language perfectly pitched for the subject matter, a ruthless dissection of a fast decaying society"—José Saramago, Nobel Prize winner The English translation of hit novel Las Viudas de Los Jueves! "Piñeiro's clever U.S. debut.. . illuminates the hypocrisies of the country's upper classes after 9/11."—Publishers Weekly "Piñeiro is particularly skilful at exposing the social forces undermining Argentine society, and the fragility of personal relationships. We learn the surprising truth of the three men's death in the final chapter; the build-up to it is riveting."—The Times (London) "Piñeiro builds up tension through banal, domestic details and the accretion of despair in everyday marital and professional struggles. There may be bloody murder at the centre of this novel, but the dystopia portrayed is an indictment not solely of an assassin but of Argentina's class structure and the willful blindness of its petty bourgeoisie."—Times Literary Supplement "A razor-sharp psychological and social portrait not only of Argentina, but of the afluent Western world as a whole."—Rosa Montero Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. It's Thursday night at the magnificent Scaglia house. Behind the locked gates, shielded from the crime, poverty, and filth of the people on the streets, the Scaglias and their friends hide lives of infidelity, alcoholism, and abusive marriage. Claudia Piñeiro's novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a story about crime. The suspense is a byproduct of Piñeiro's hand at crafting a psychological portrait of a professional class that lives beyond its means and leads secret lives of deadly stress and despair. It takes place during the post-9/11 economic meltdown in Argentina, but it is a universal story that will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today. The film of Thursday Night Widows, by Argentine New Wave and award-winning director Marcelo Piñeyro is coming soon with trailers available online. Claudia Piñeiro was a journalist, playwright, and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade Annual Journalism Award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of literary crime novels that are all bestsellers in Latin America and have been translated into four languages. This novel won the Clarin Prize for fiction and is her first title to be available in English.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

BACK TO THE COAST

THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ

A NOT SO PERFECT CRIME

DOG EATS DOG

Copyright Page

Claudia Piñeiro lives in Buenos Aires. For many years she was a journalist, playwright and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade journalism award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author the crime novel Tuya (finalist for the 2003 Planeta Prize), Elena sabe and Un ladrón entre nosotros. Thursday Night Widows is her first novel to be available in English and won the Clarín Prize for fiction in 2005.

To Gabriel and to my children

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the Thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind.

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Without servants there can be no tragedy, only a sordid bourgeois drama. While you are washing your own tea cup and emptying the ashtrays, passion ebbs away.

Manuel Puig, Under a Mantle of Stars

1

I opened the fridge and stood there for a moment with my hand still on the door, bathed in the cold light, gazing blankly at the illuminated shelves. Only the alarm going off, warning that the open door was letting out cold air, brought me back to my senses and reminded me why I was standing in front of the fridge. I looked for something to eat. I collected some of the previous day’s leftovers on a plate, warmed them up in the microwave and took them to the table. I didn’t put on a tablecloth, just one of those rafia place mats brought back from Brazil a couple of years ago, from one of the last holidays the three of us took together. I mean as a family. I sat down opposite the window – it wasn’t my usual place at the table, but I liked to look out at the garden when I was eating alone. That night, the night in question, Ronie was having dinner at El Tano Scaglia’s house. The same as every Thursday – except that this day was different. It was a Thursday in September 2001. Thursday 27th September 2001. That Thursday. We were all still in shock after the attack on the Twin Towers and were opening our letters wearing rubber gloves, for fear of finding white powder inside. Juani had gone out. I didn’t ask him where, or with whom. Juani didn’t like to be asked. But I knew anyway. Or I thought I did.

I ate almost without dirtying any plates. A few years back I had accepted that we could no longer afford full-time domestic staff, and now a woman came only twice a week to do the heavy work. Meanwhile, I had learned how to create the least possible mess: I knew how to keep my clothes crease-free and how to leave the bedclothes scarcely rumpled. It wasn’t so much that the chores were a burden, but washing plates, making beds and ironing clothes reminded me of what I had once had, and lost.

I thought of going out for a walk, but I was nervous of running into Juani, in case he thought I was spying on him. It was hot; the night was star-filled and luminous. I didn’t want to go to bed if it meant lying awake, worrying about some property transaction that was not yet complete. At that time, it felt as though every deal were doomed to collapse before I’d had a chance to collect my commission. We had already weathered a few months of the economic crisis. Some people were putting a better face on it than others, but one way or another all our lives had changed – or were about to change. I went to my room to look for a cigarette. I had decided to go out, regardless of Juani, and I liked to smoke as I walked. As I passed my son’s room, I thought of going in to look for cigarettes there, but I knew that I wouldn’t find any. It would simply be an excuse to go in and poke around, and I had already done that this morning, when I had made his bed and tidied his room – and I hadn’t found what I was looking for then, either. I went on to my room, where there was a new packet on the bedside table; I opened it, took out a cigarette, lit it and went down the stairs, ready to go out. That was when Ronie came in and my plans changed. Nothing turned out as expected that night.

Ronie went straight to the bar. “Strange you’re back so soon…” I said, from the foot of the stairs.

“Yes,” he said, and went upstairs with a glass and a bottle of whisky. I waited for a moment, standing there, and then I followed him up. I walked past our bedroom, but he wasn’t in there. Nor was he in the bathroom. He had gone out to the terrace and was settled onto a lounger, preparing to drink. I pulled up a chair, sat down next to him and waited, following his gaze but saying nothing. I wanted him to tell me something. Not anything important or funny or even particularly meaningful – but just for him to play his usual part in the scanty exchange to which our conversations had been reduced over the years. We had an unspoken agreement to string set phrases together, to let words fill the silence, with the aim of never addressing the silence itself. They were empty words, husks of words. If I ever complained, Ronie argued that we spoke little because we spent too much time together – how could there be anything new to talk about when we had not been apart for most of the day? Yet these were our circumstances ever since Ronie had lost his job six years ago and had not found any other occupation, apart from one or two “projects” that never amounted to anything. I was not anxious to discover why our relationship had gradually become stripped of words, so much as why it was that I had only recently noticed the silence that had taken up residence in our house, like a distant relative whom one has no choice but to accommodate and look after. Why did it not cause me more pain? Perhaps it was because the pain was taking hold very gradually and in silence. Like the silence itself.

“I’m going to fetch a glass,” I said.

“Bring some ice, Virginia,” Ronie shouted after me, when I had already gone inside.

I went to the kitchen and, while filling up the ice bucket, pondered different explanations for Ronie’s early return. My hunch was that he had argued with someone. With El Tano Scaglia, or with Gustavo, surely. Not with Martín Urovich, because Martín had given up fighting with anyone, even himself, ages ago. Back on the terrace, I asked Ronie point-blank – I didn’t want to find out the next day, during a tennis game, from someone else’s wife. Ever since he had lost his job, Ronie had nursed a resentment that was liable to flare up at the least opportune moment. That social mechanism that prevents us making unwelcome comments had long been faulty in my husband.

“No, I didn’t have a fight with anyone.”

“Then why are you back so early? You never come home on Thursdays earlier than three o’clock in the morning.”

“I did today,” he said. Then he said nothing else, and left no room for me to say anything either. He stood up and moved his lounger closer to the balustrade, all but turning his back on me. It was less a gesture of rejection than of a spectator seeking the best spot from which to view a scene. Our house is diagonally opposite the Scaglias’. There are two or three others in between but, since ours is taller – and in spite of the Iturrías’ poplars, which interfere with the view somewhat – from that vantage point you can see almost all their garden and their swimming pool. Ronie was looking towards the pool. The lights were off and there wasn’t much to see other than vague shapes and outlines; one could make out the movement of water, sketching shifting shadows on the turquoise tiles.

I stood up and leaned on the back of Ronie’s lounger. The silence of the night was underscored by the occasional rustle of the Iturrías’ poplars as they moved in the warm air, making a sound like rain in the starry night. I wasn’t sure whether to stay or go because, for all that Ronie seemed absent, he had not insinuated that I should leave – and that mattered to me. I watched him from behind, over the top of the wooden chair back. He kept moving around on the lounger without finding the right position; he seemed nervous. Later on I discovered that fear was the problem, not nerves – but I didn’t know that at the time nor would I have suspected such a thing, because Ronie had never been fearful of anything. Not even of that fearful thing that had been frightening me for months, pursuing me day and night. That fear that made me forget what I was doing while standing in front of the fridge. That fear that was always with me even when I feigned otherwise, even when I was laughing, or chatting about something, or playing tennis, or signing a document. That night, in spite of Ronie’s distance, the same fear prompted me to say, with false composure: “Juani’s gone out.” “Who with?” he wanted to know.

“I didn’t ask him.”

“What time is he coming back?”

“I don’t know. He went on his roller blades.”

There was another silence and then I said: “There was a message from Romina on the answerphone. She said she was waiting for him so that they could go out and do the rounds. Could ‘doing the rounds’ be some form of code between them?”

“Rounds are rounds, Virginia.”

“I shouldn’t worry, then?”

“No.”

“He must be with her.”

“He must be with her.” And we both fell silent again.

There were more words later, I think, though I don’t remember. More of those pat phrases to which we had grown accustomed. Ronie poured himself another whisky and I passed him the ice. He grabbed a handful of ice cubes and some of them fell on the floor and slid towards the balustrade. His eyes followed them and it seemed as though he had forgotten about the house opposite for a moment. He looked at the ice cubes and I looked at him. And perhaps we would have stayed in these poses, but at that very moment the lights went on at the Scaglias’ swimming pool and voices could be heard amid the rustling of poplar leaves. El Tano’s laughter. Music; it sounded like some sort of wistful, contemporary jazz.

“Diana Krall?” I asked, but Ronie said nothing. He had gone tense again; he stood up, kicked away the ice cubes, and returned to his seat. He raised his clenched fists to his mouth, gritting his teeth. I realized that he was hiding something from me, something he dared not let out of that mouth clamped shut. It had something to do with whatever he was watching so intently. An argument, or resentment, a slight that had rankled. Humiliation disguised as a joke: that was El Tano’s speciality, I thought. Ronie stood up once more and went to the balustrade to get a better view. He drained the whisky glass. Now he was blocking my view through the poplars, watching something I could not see. But I heard a splash and I guessed that someone had dived into the Scaglias’ pool.

“Who jumped in?” I asked.

There was no answer and the truth was that I didn’t really care who had jumped in, but I cared about the silence, which was like a wall I kept banging into every time I tried to get closer. Tired of making futile efforts, I decided to go downstairs. Not because I was annoyed, but because it was obvious that Ronie wasn’t with me at all, but across the street, throwing himself into the pool with his friends. While I was still at the top of the stairs, the jazz that was wafting over from El Tano’s house stopped, right in the middle of a riff, breaking it off.

I went down to the kitchen and rinsed out my glass for longer than was necessary, my head filling up again with more thoughts than it had room for. Juani was on my mind, not Ronie, no matter what distraction methods I used to avoid thinking about him. Like those people who count sheep to get to sleep, I focused on work that was pending at the estate agency: whom I was going to take to see the Gómez Pardo house; how I was going to secure finances for the Canetti sale; that deposit I had forgotten to charge the Abrevayas. Then up again popped Juani – not Ronie. Juani, in even sharper focus. I dried the glass and put it away, then took it out again and filled it with water; I was going to need something to help me sleep that night. Something to knock me out. There must be a pill in my medicine cabinet that would do the trick. Fortunately I had no time to take anything, because just then I heard hurried footsteps, a shout and the dry, hard thud of something striking the decking. I ran out and found my husband lying on the ground covered in blood and with one of his leg bones protruding through the skin. I went dizzy, as though everything around me were spinning, but I knew I must get a grip on myself because I was alone and I had to look after him, and thank goodness I hadn’t taken anything because I was going to have to make a tourniquet – and I didn’t know how to do that – to tie a rag somehow, a clean towel, to staunch the blood and then call an ambulance; no, not an ambulance because they take too long – better to go straight to the hospital and leave a note for Juani: “Daddy and I have gone to do something but we’ll be back very soon. If you need me, call the mobile. Everything’s fine. I hope you are too, love Mummy.”

While I was dragging him towards the car, Ronie cried out in pain, and the cry galvanized me.

“Virginia, take me to El Tano’s!” he shouted. I ignored this, believing him to be delirious, and somehow I manhandled him into the back of the car.

“Take me to El Tano’s, for fuck’s sake!” he shouted again before passing out (from the pain, they said later in the hospital – but that wasn’t it). I drove fast and badly, ignoring the speed bumps and signs that said “Slow down. Children playing.” I didn’t even stop when I saw Juani bolting across a side street with no shoes on. Romina was behind him. As if they were running away from something – those two are always running away from something, I thought. And forgetting their roller blades somewhere or other. Juani is always losing his stuff. But I could not start thinking about Juani. Not that night. On the way to the entrance gate, Ronie woke up. Still woozy, he looked out of the window, trying to see where he was, but seemingly unable to make sense of things. He wasn’t shouting any more. Two streets before leaving The Cascade we passed Teresa Scaglia’s SUV.

“Was that Teresa?” Ronie asked.

“Yes.”

Ronie clutched his head and began to cry, softly at first, a kind of lamentation which grew into stifled sobbing. I saw him in the rear-view mirror, curled up in pain. I spoke to him, trying to calm him, but this proved impossible, so I resigned myself to the litany, just as one resigns oneself to a gradually encroaching pain, or to conversations full of empty words.

By the time we arrived at the hospital, I was no longer paying attention to my husband’s weeping. But it continued nonetheless.

“Why are you crying like this?” asked the duty doctor. “Is it very painful?”

“I’m scared,” replied Ronie.

2

The Scaglias’ house may not have been the best in Cascade Heights, but Virginia always said that it was the one that most caught the eye of her clients at the estate agency. And if anyone knew about the best and worst houses in the neighbourhood, it was her. Tano’s house was unarguably one of the largest in our gated community (we liked to call it a “country club”), and therein lay the difference. Lots of us were secretly envious of it. The exterior boasted pointed brickwork, black slate roof tiles in various tones and white woodwork. Inside, arranged over two levels, were six bedrooms and eight bathrooms, not including the maid’s room. Thanks to the architect’s contacts, the house had been featured in two or three decor magazines. On the top floor there was a home theatre and, next to the kitchen, a family room with rattan furniture and a table made from wood and oxidized metal. The living room looked onto the swimming pool and if one sat in the sand-coloured armchairs which faced the wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor window, one had the impression of being outside on the wooden deck that extended from the veranda.

In the garden, each shrub had been positioned with careful regard to its colour, height, bulk and movement. “It’s like my calling card,” said Teresa, who had abandoned graphology shortly after she moved to Cascade Heights in order to take up landscape gardening. And, even though she did not need to work, she was always on the hunt for new clients, as if their conquest signified much more to her than simply a new garden to tend. In her own garden, there were no dried-up or diseased plants, nothing that had grown by chance because a seed blew in and landed there, no ants’ nests or slugs. Her lawn was like an immaculate carpet, intensely green, with no changes in hue. An imaginary line, an exact point at which the grass changed colour, marked the end of the Scaglias’ garden and the beginning of the golf course: the seventeenth hole. The view from the house was completed by a bunker to the left and to the right a “hazard” – an artificial pool of glassy water.

That night, Teresa had entered the house through the door from the garage. She didn’t need to use keys: in Cascade Heights we never lock the doors. She says that she was puzzled not to hear her husband and his friends – our friends – laughing as usual. Drunken laughter. And she was pleased not to have to go and say hello; she was too tired to smile at the same old jokes, she said. Every Thursday the men got together to have dinner and play cards, and for a long time it had been traditional for the wives to go to the cinema. Except for Virginia, who had bowed out some time ago, with different sorts of excuses which no one bothered to analyse too much; quietly we all attributed her absence to money problems. The Scaglia children were not at home either, that night. Matías was spending the night at the Floríns’ house, and Sofía – much against her will, but at her father’s insistence – had gone to stay with her maternal grandparents. And it was the maid’s day off. El Tano himself had said that she should have Thursdays free so that there would be nobody in the house to bother him and his friends, interrupting their card game for whatever reason.

Teresa went upstairs, dreading to find the men sleeping off an excess of wine and champagne in the home theatre, while pretending to watch a film or some sporting event. They were not there, however, which meant that there was no risk of running into them on the way to her room. The house felt deserted. She was intrigued, rather than worried. Her husband’s friends must be somewhere nearby, she thought, unless they had left on foot; pulling into the drive, she had had to avoid Gustavo Masotta and Martín Urovich’s SUVs, parked outside her house. Now she leaned over the balcony and, in the darkness, she thought she could see some towels on the wooden deck. September was barely over, but it was a pleasant night and, now that El Tano had installed a boiler to heat the water, the usual quandaries regarding swimming and weather no longer applied. No doubt they had sobered up in the pool and were getting dressed in the changing room. So, because she did not feel like thinking about it any more, she put on her night dress and got into bed.

At four o’clock in the morning she woke up alone. The left side of the bed was undisturbed. She walked to the front of the house and, through the window, saw that the SUVs were still there. The house was still silent. She went downstairs and into the living room and confirmed that what she had seen from the balcony were towels and T-shirts lying on the deck. But there were no lights on around the pool, and it was hard to make anything else out. She went to the family room; there was nothing unusual here: empty bottles, ashtrays full of butts, cards strewn across the table, as though the game had only recently ended. Next she went down to the pool house and in the changing room she found the men’s clothes lying on a bench; some scrunched-up underpants were lying on the floor; one sock without its mate was hanging from a tap in the shower. Only El Tano had neatly folded his clothes and left them at one end of the bench, beside his shoes. They couldn’t have gone for a walk at this time of night in their swimming trunks, she thought. Then she went towards the swimming pool. She tried to put on the lights, but they were not working in this area, as if the circuit breaker had cut in, she thought, but later she found out that it had been the thermal overload trip, not the circuit breaker. The water was calm. She felt the towels and realized that they had not been used – they were slightly damp to the touch, but otherwise dry. Three empty champagne flutes, arranged in a row at the edge of the pool, caught her off-guard. Not because the men had been drinking there – they drank all over the place – but because these were the crystal glasses from her wedding set, the ones that El Tano’s father had given them and which El Tano himself reserved for very special occasions. Teresa moved to pick them up, before they could be toppled by the morning breeze or by a cat or frog. If it weren’t for this sort of accident of nature, life at the Cascade would be almost free of risks. That was what we used to believe.

Teresa barely glanced at the still water as she collected the glasses. Two of them knocked together as she picked them up, and the ringing sound of crystal made her shudder. She examined them to make sure they were not broken. And she walked back to the house. She walked slowly, taking care not to let the glasses knock against each other again, and oblivious to the knowledge that the rest of us would learn about the next day: beneath the warm water, sinking to the bottom of the pool, were the bodies of her husband and his friends, and all three of them were dead.

3

Cascade Heights is the neighbourhood where we live. All us lot. Ronie and Guevara moved here first, just before the Uroviches; El Tano came a few years later; Gustavo Masotta was one of the last to arrive. As time went on, we became neighbours. Our neighbourhood is a gated community, ringed by a perimeter fence that is concealed behind different kinds of shrub. It’s called The Cascade Heights Country Club. Most of us shorten the name to “The Cascade” and a few people call it “The Heights”. It has a golf course, tennis courts, swimming pool and two club houses. And private security. Fifteen security guards working shifts during the day, and twenty-two at night. That’s more than five hundred acres of land, accessible only to us or to people authorized by one of us.

There are three ways to enter our neighbourhood. If you’re a member, you can open a barrier at the main gate by swiping a personalized magnetic card across an electronic reader. There’s a side entrance, also with a barrier, for visitors who have received prior authorization and can supply certain information, such as identity card number, car registration number and other identifying numbers. For tradesmen, domestic staff, gardeners, painters, builders and all other labourers, there’s a turnstile where ID cards have to be presented, and bags and car boots are checked. All along the perimeter, at fifty-yard intervals, there are cameras which can turn through one hundred and eighty degrees. There used to be cameras that could turn three hundred and sixty degrees, but they were invading the privacy of some members whose houses were close to the perimeter fence, so a few years ago they were deactivated, then replaced.

The houses are separated from one another by “living fences” – bushes, in other words. But these are not any old bushes. Privet is out of fashion, along with that erstwhile favourite, the violet campanula that grows by railway lines. There are none of those straight, trimmed hedges that look like green walls. Definitely no round ones. The hedges are cut to look uneven, just this side of messy, giving them a natural appearance that is meticulously contrived. At first glance, these plants seem to have sprung up spontaneously between the neighbours, rather than to have been placed deliberately, to demarcate properties. Such boundaries may be insinuated only with plants. Wire fencing and railings are not permitted, let alone walls. The only exception is the six foot-high perimeter fence which is the responsibility of the Club’s administration and which is shortly going to be replaced by a wall, in line with new security regulations. Gardens that back onto the golf course may not be contained on that side even by a living fence; close to the boundary, you can make out where the gardens end because the type of grass changes but, from a distance, the gaze is lost in an endless green vista and it is possible to believe that everything belongs to you.

The streets are named after birds: Swallow, Mockingbird, Blackbird. The grid lay-out typical of most Argentine towns does not apply here. There are lots of cul-de-sacs, ending in little landscaped roundabouts. These dead-end streets are more popular than the others because they have less traffic and are quieter. We’d all love to live in a cul-de-sac. Outside a gated community, it would be hair-raising to have to walk down that sort of street, especially at night; you’d be afraid of being attacked, or ambushed. But not in The Cascade – that wouldn’t be possible; you can walk wherever you like, at any hour, safe in the knowledge that nothing bad will happen to you.

There are no pavements. People use cars, motorbikes, quad bikes, bicycles, golf buggies, scooters and roller blades. If they walk, they walk on the road. As a general rule, if someone is walking and not carrying sports gear, it’s a domestic servant or gardener. At Cascade Heights we call them “groundsmen” rather than gardeners, doubtless because not many plots are smaller than half an acre, and, at that size, a garden is more like an estate.

Look up and you won’t see any cables. No electricity, telephone or television wires. Of course we have all three, but the lines run underground, to protect The Heights and its inhabitants from visual contamination. The cables run alongside the drains, both of them hidden underground.

Water tanks, which also have to be concealed from view, are camouflaged by false walls built around them. Hanging out washing isn’t permitted without prior approval from the Technical Department. They look at a plan of the grounds before approving a suitable place for a washing line. If a resident proceeds to hang up washing in an area which can be seen from neighbouring houses, and if someone reports the matter, he or she can be fined.

The houses are all different; no house is expressly planned as a copy of another – although that may be the end result. It’s impossible for the houses not to be similar, given that they must obey the same aesthetic norms – those dictated by the building code and fashion alike. We would all like our house to be the prettiest. Or the biggest. Or the best designed. The whole neighbourhood is divided by statute into sectors where only one sort of house may be built. There is a sector where the houses must be white. There’s a brick houses sector and a black slate roofs sector. One cannot build a house of one type in a sector designated as being for another type. An aerial view of the club shows it separated into three swathes of colour: one red, one white and one black.

In the brick sector are the “dormitory” apartments, set aside for those members who only come at the weekends and don’t want to maintain a house here. From far away, the dorms look like three large chalets, but in fact there are a lot of small rooms squeezed into those three blocks, with a neatly tended garden at the front.

There’s another characteristic of our neighbourhood, and perhaps it’s the most striking of all: the smells. They change with the season. In September everything smells of Star Jasmine. This isn’t a poetic detail, but simple fact. Every garden in The Cascade has at least one star jasmine which flowers in the spring. Three hundred houses, with three hundred gardens, with three hundred jasmine plants, contained in a five-hundred-acre estate with a perimeter fence and private security: that’s no poetic aside. It is the reason why the air feels heavy and sweet in spring. It’s sickly for those who aren’t used to it. But in some of us it engenders a kind of addiction, or attraction or nostalgia – and whenever we go beyond the gates, we’re longing to return, to breathe in once more the scent of those sweet flowers. As though it were not possible to breathe well anywhere else. The air in Cascade Heights is heavy, palpable; we choose to live here because we like to breathe like this, with the bees buzzing behind some jasmine plant. And even though the perfume changes with each season, the desire to breathe that sweet air remains. In summer, The Cascade smells of freshly mown and watered grass, and of the chlorine in swimming pools. Summer is the season of noise. Splashes, the shouts of children playing, cicadas, birds complaining of the heat, the strains of music through an open window; someone playing the drums. Windows without bars, because there are no bars in The Cascade. There’s no need for bars. Mosquito netting – yes, to keep the insects at bay. The autumn smells of pruned boughs, recently cut and still fresh; they never leave them to rot. There are men in green sweatshirts with the Cascade Heights logo who collect the leaves and branches after every storm or gale. All traces of a storm have often disappeared by the time we’ve had breakfast and gone out to work, to school or for a morning walk. The first we know of it is the damp ground, the smell of wet earth. Sometimes we may wonder if the gale that woke us during the night really took place or belonged to a dream. In winter there is the smell of log fires, of smoke and eucalyptus. And then the most private and secret of all, the smell of the home itself, composed of mixed elements that are known only to each one of us.

Those of us who move to Cascade Heights say that we have come in search of “green”, a healthy life, sports and security. Trotting out these reasons means not having to confess, even to ourselves, the real reasons for coming. And after a while we don’t even remember them. Entrance into The Cascade induces a certain magical forgetfulness of all that went before. The past is reduced to last week, last month, last year, “when we played the Inter-Club Challenge and won it”. Gradually we forget our lifelong friends, the places we once loved, certain relations, memories, mistakes. It’s as though it were possible, in mid-life, to tear the pages out of your diary and begin to write something new.

4

We moved to The Cascade at the end of the 1980s. Argentina had a new president. We should not have had him until the end of December, but hyperinflation and the looting of supermarkets prompted the last one to leave office before the end of his term. At that time, the move towards gated communities on the outskirts of greater Buenos Aires had not yet gained momentum. Few people lived permanently at Cascade Heights – or at any other gated community or country club. Ronie and I were among the first to risk leaving an apartment in the capital to move in here with our family. Ronie was very doubtful at the start. Too much travelling, he said. I was the one who insisted – I was sure that living in Cascade Heights was going to change our lives, that we needed to make a break with the city. And Ronie ended up agreeing with me.

We sold a weekend cottage that we had inherited from Ronie’s family (one of the few things from that inheritance left to sell), then we bought the Antieris’ house. It was, as I like to say, a “sweet deal”. And it was the first inkling I had that buying and selling houses was something I liked and for which I had an innate talent. Although in those days I knew much less about the business than I do now.

Antieri had committed suicide two months earlier. His widow was desperate to leave the house where her husband, and father of her four children, had blown out his brains. In the living room. A small “L” shaped living room with an incorporated dining area. In the early years at The Cascade and other country clubs, almost all the houses had small living rooms. The thing is, in those days – we’re talking about the Fifties, the Sixties, even the Seventies – you wouldn’t expect to have parties and entertain people in a house so far from Buenos Aires. The Pan American Highway as we know it today, with its dual carriageway and flawless asphalt, was still a pipe dream. If you invited friends or relations over it was for a proper country adventure – everyone made good use of the garden, the sports area, you took them riding or to play golf. Later came the era of showing off imported carpets and armchairs bought in the best Buenos Aires stores. We moved in at some intermediate point – after the Sixties, but before the Nineties ethos took hold. Even so, it was obvious that we were much closer to the Nineties than the Sixties, and not just chronologically. We decided to knock down a wall and make the living room a few feet bigger, at the expense of a study we knew we would never use.

The Antieri episode took place one Sunday at midday. Even from the golf course they heard his wife’s screams. The house is almost opposite the tee at the fourth hole, and to this day Paco Pérez Ayerra – who was the captain of the club at the time – likes to tell the story of the long drive that he sent out of bounds because the screaming started just as his one wood hit the ball. People said that Antieri had been in the military, or the navy – something like that. Nobody knew what, exactly. But definitely in uniform. They didn’t have much to do with their neighbours, didn’t do sports or go to parties. Occasionally we saw their girls out and about. But the parents had no social life. They used to come at the weekend and shut themselves up in the house. Towards the end, he was also spending the weeks there, alone, with the blinds down, cleaning his collection of weapons, apparently. He never spoke to anyone. So I don’t think you have to look too far for a concrete motive, nor give too much credit to the rumour that went round claiming that Antieri had threatened to blow his brains out if the result of the 1989 election went the wrong way. The same threat was made by an actor who went through with it and was on all the news bulletins afterwards; someone probably confused the two anecdotes and started the rumour.

When I first saw the house, what most impressed me was Antieri’s study (the one we ended up knocking through). The order and cleanliness in there were intimidating. A fully stocked bookcase lined all the walls. The spines were perfect and intact, bound in green or burgundy leather. His guns, in all their various models and calibres, were displayed in two glass cabinets. They were polished and shining, not a speck of dust to be seen. While we were looking around the study, Juani, who was just five, took out one of the books, threw it on the floor and stood on it. The book’s spine immediately gave way. Ronie grabbed him by the hair and pulled him away. He took him out of the room to chastise him without witnesses. Meanwhile I took care of the book, dusting off Juani’s footprint. Returning it to the shelf, I noticed how light it was, and turned it over. It was hollow. There were no pages inside, just hard covers: a box of fake literature. On the spine I read Faust, by Goethe. I put it in its place, between Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. All of them were hollow. To the right of these there were two or three other classics, then the sequence was repeated: Life Is a Dream, Faust, Crime and Punishment, in gold filigree letters. The same series was on every shelf.

We got the house for next to nothing. Offers from various other interested parties fell away, as people found out that a man had shot himself there. The wife didn’t mention it, nor did the estate agent in charge of the sale. But somehow the story always came out. It made no difference to me, to tell the truth: I’m not superstitious. To cap it all, when it came to exchange contracts, it turned out that some papers pertaining to the estate weren’t in order, so the widow had to shoulder all the costs, hers and ours. I even made an extra two hundred pesos when I sold to Rita Mansilla the hollow books which the widow hadn’t wanted to take and which were gathering dust in the basement.

So the house ended up costing us only about fifteen thousand dollars more than the weekend getaway we’d sold, and this new place comprised a ground area of half an acre, about an eighth of which was covered; there were three en-suite bathrooms and staff accommodation. It was full of light, now that Antieri was not there to put down the blinds. Before we moved in, we painted all the rooms white, to make it lighter still. That was a favourite trick in the Buenos Aires property market, but in The Cascade, I came to realize, such devices were not necessary. In The Cascade, the sun comes in anyway, through the open windows; there are no tall buildings to cast long shadows, no dividing walls to block out the light. Only the plots with a high number of trees are likely to have a problem with light and shade, and that wasn’t the case with us.

It was the first good property deal I closed in my life, and it whetted my appetite. At first, it was almost like a game. If I found out that someone was hard up, or that a couple was separating, that some unemployed husband had found a job abroad and was leaving with his family – or perhaps they were going anyway, without an offer of work, because he was tired of having no job and a golf course and swimming pool to maintain – straight away I started thinking of people who might be interested in the house and I got in touch.

It was about two years later that I sold a plot of land to the Scaglias. This was a few days after the Minister for Foreign Affairs became the Finance Minister he had always been destined to be and persuaded Congress to pass the Convertibility Law.1 One peso would be worth one dollar: the famous “one for one” that restored Argentines’ confidence and fuelled an exodus to places like Cascade Heights.

There are some events, not many, fewer than one might suppose, that actually change the course of our lives. Selling that land to the Scaglias, in that March of 1991, was without any doubt one such event.

5

I remember it as if it were yesterday. A pair of brown crocodile shoes preceded her out of the car. Teresa Scaglia took barely a step and the stiletto heel of one of them sank into the very ground I was hoping to sell the couple. Seeing that Teresa was embarrassed, I tried to play the incident down:

“It happens to all of us city girls once,” I said. “It’s hard to give up your heels. Believe me, it’s one of the hardest things. But if you have to choose between heels and this…” I gestured extravagantly towards the trees and landscape around us.

El Tano appeared not to have noticed his wife sinking into the soil. He was walking two or three yards ahead of her. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that he was a man in a hurry. Or, if he did seem rushed, then that was symptomatic of an impatient disposition rather than the pressures of time. It was as if he did not want to wait – for his wife, or for anyone else. El Tano walked on and I waited a moment for Teresa. To think that woman ended up being a landscape gardener! When she first arrived at Cascade Heights, the only thing she knew about the subject was that she liked plants. Teresa extracted her heel from the soft earth and tried to clean it on the grass while, inevitably, the other heel sank in. All her efforts were in vain. The heel she had cleaned was doomed to sink in again, the other one was going to come out muddy and, clean it as she might, would then get dirty again. But to point out this information, denying her capacity to absorb it for herself, would have seemed as disrespectful and impatient as her husband’s haste. I was already feeling anxious: the commission on the sale of this land was earmarked for various improvements pending in my own home. I wondered which option to choose. The first time I had sunk into The Cascade I had ended up taking off my shoes and looking round the site in my stockinged feet. We were young and Ronie had laughed: we both had laughed. But Teresa and I are very different. All the women here are very different, even though some people make the mistake of believing that women who live in a place like this grow to resemble one another. They call us “country-club women”. That stereotype is wrong-headed. Yes, it’s true that we go through the same sorts of experience, that the same sorts of thing happen to us. Or that the same sorts of thing do not happen to us, and in that respect we are similar too. For example, we all find it hard, at the start, to give up certain habits: there is no room here for high heels, silk hosiery or curtains that drop to the floor. In another context, any one of those details would signal elegance, but in Cascade Heights they end up signalling dirt. Because heels sink into the lawn and emerge covered in soil and grass; because stockings ladder when they come into contact with rough-edged plants, MDF or rattan garden furniture; because much more dust blows into houses than into apartments and it gets spread around by children, dogs or long drapes – and everything looks filthy.

It took Teresa a few yards to grasp that there was nothing she could do. She opted for walking on tip-toe – a compromise solution I’ve seen other city women try – and settled for looking from afar, instead of walking around the plot hand in hand with her husband. Meanwhile, El Tano strode ahead, his hands in his pockets, planting his feet firmly in the ground. It was clear that he was marking his territory with every step. If he had been an animal, he’d have pissed on it. There was no doubting his body language: this was the land he had been looking for. His stance should have made me think cheerfully of the commission that was close at hand, but instead it unnerved me and I told him that I would have to check with the owner that the land was still for sale.

“If it’s not for sale, why are you showing me it?”

“No, yes – it is for sale, or it was. Caviró Senior, the owner, placed it with my agency a couple of months ago but, I don’t know, I’d like to be sure.”

“If he placed it with your agency, that means it’s for sale.”

And that would be the case in many places, but not in The Cascade. In The Cascade one has to learn to operate with a certain flexibility. Sometimes people tell you they want to sell, then a son turns up, claiming a stake, or they fear selling will bring social embarrassment, or they can’t agree with their wives. And the agency has to pick up the pieces. In this case, that’s me, Virginia, or “Mavi Guevara”, to use my business name. Some people put a house or plot up for sale to test the market, or because they want to know how much it’s gone up in value since they bought it, or because a valuation is too abstract a measure for them, and they need to see in front of them someone who wants what they have and has the cash in hand to get it. And then they say no, they don’t want to sell.

“I want this land,” El Tano said again.

“I’ll do what I can,” I remember answering.